Tag Archive for ride-outs

Input wanted on improving access to Santa Monica Expo Line station, and yesterday’s ride out honors Kobe Bryant

Santa Monica Spoke is asking for your input on proposed new safety enhancements to improve access for bicyclists and pedestrians to the 26th Street/Bergamot Station Expo Line Station in Santa Monica.

The project could be in jeopardy after one business owner in the area complained. Even though it was designed with input from the local business community.

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Hundreds of bike riders from across the city turned out for the decade’s first ride out.

And paused along the way to honor former LA Laker Kobe Bryant, who was killed in a helicopter crash Sunday morning, along with his daughter and seven other people.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B7zD9ivn3b1/

Although similar rides in Fremont don’t seem to be as welcome as they are in Los Angeles.

Thanks to Megan Lynch for the link.

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Tragic news from the world of music, as Mars Volta, Marilyn Manson and Racer X bassist Juan Alderete is in a coma after suffering a serious TBI in a solo bike crash.

And yes, he was wearing a helmet.

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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes — and runners — goes on. 

Someone booby trapped an Australian trail with nail-spiked wine corks hidden under leaves, which could penetrate a shoe or take out a bike tire — or a person in the event of a fall.

But sometimes it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly. 

San Diego police are looking for a BMX-riding arsonist who set fire to a business in the Talmadge neighborhood, causing $1 million damage.

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Local

The Red Car Bridge is now officially open, providing a bike and pedestrian alternative to the nearby Glendale-Hyperion Bridge over the LA River between Atwater Village and Silver Lake.

Rather than the dying commercial district that MarVista NIMBYs and traffic safety deniers would have you believe, the road diet and protected bike lanes that make up the Venice Blvd Great Streets project has resulted in a thriving business district.

An op-ed in the LA Times says ebikes may be the greenest form of transportation in human history. And questions why cities aren’t taking advantage of that. No, regular bicycles already claimed that title a long time ago, even if ebikes do offer a number of advantages.

Selena Gomez is one of us, going for a casual bike ride through Studio City.

Bike the Vote LA has endorsed Dan Brotman in his run for Glendale city council.

 

State

Streetsblog says former LACBC Executive Director Tamika Butler left the not-very-diverse California Transportation Commission due to a conflict of interest, but doesn’t shed much light on the subject.

A San Diego TV station talks with Maya Rosas, Policy Director for Circulate San Diego, about the city’s Vision Zero plan to eliminate traffic deaths within the next five years.

Bicycling catches up on the story of a San Diego man who rode his bike 1,426 miles across the US to meet the parents of a 32-year-old Navy flight surgeon, after receiving the service member’s heart to save his life. Thanks to Victor Bale for the link.

An Oxnard woman was rushed into surgery after she was struck by a heartless coward who fled the scene, leaving her bleeding in the street.

A 75-year old Pacifica man is in critical condition with major injuries after he was struck by a driver while riding his bike.

The San Francisco Chronicle offers a timeline of the 114-year effort to ban cars from the city’s iconic Market Street. Or maybe it was really 124 years ago.

 

National

The Motley Fool says you could save as much as $9,000 a year just by kicking your car to the curb.

Forget Vision Zero, a third of US states are expecting an increase in traffic deaths.

Over 80 percent of drivers admit to road rage, while nearly half of all drivers are armed, legally or otherwise. And the other 20% are probably lying. Thanks to Erik Griswold for the tip.

Life is cheap in Denver, where a dump truck driver walks without a single day behind bars for the sudden right turn that took the life of a young mother as she rode her bicycle in a bike lane; needless to say, the victim’s family isn’t happy about it.

The Des Moines Register announces the route for this year’s RAGBRAI ride across the state.

The NYPD has finally decided to focus their efforts on unsafe bike riding, instead of targeting everyone on a ebike; ebikes could soon be legal in the state anyway.

New York Jets and former USC QB Sam Darnold may or may not be one of us, but his linemen are after the quarterback bought them all ebikes as a holiday gift.

DC plans to combat the growing clutter on the sidewalk by installing 100 on-street parking corrals for dockless bikes and e-scooters.

A Baton Rouge LA bike rider was collateral damage in a street racing crash between two brothers in their 50s, who should have effing known better; now one is dead, along with the bike-riding victim, who was planning to propose to his girlfriend on Valentines Day.

Nearly 200 Miami bicyclists rode in honor of the leader of a local bike club, who was shot to death outside a bike shop three weeks ago while waiting for members to arrive for another ride.

 

International

The BMJ, the former British Medical Journal, pulls the plug on fossil fuels in the prestigious publication.

Cycling Weekly recommends what to buy when you have too much money and need to find some damn thing to spend it on aren’t willing to settle for anything but the best, or at least most expensive, components.

A British Columbia judge rules that yes, bike lanes extend across intersections even when they’re not painted all the way across, and 89-year old drivers don’t have the right to right hook women on bikes.

An Edmonton, Canada soccer player was flown home on Friday after a crowdfunding campaign raised over $136,000 when she was paralyzed from the chest down in a fall while bicycling in Costa Rica.

Local bike riders are often told by non-bike riding NIMBYs that no one will ever ride a bike in a Los Angeles winter. But an Ottawa, Canada bike rider explains how and why he started riding the city’s freezing, snow covered streets.

An English bike paramedic was viciously kicked in the head while tending to a patient last month, something he describes as becoming increasingly common.

A British truck driver got a well deserved three and a half years for killing a bike rider while high on coke and weed, despite playing the nearly universal Get Out of Jail Free card by claiming the sun was in his eyes.

Congratulations, Critical Massers, you’re now on a counter-terrorism watchlist, at least in the UK.

People in the Belgian city of Ghent seem happy they kicked cars out of the city center.

Aussie cops take their vindictive bike helmet enforcement to a ridiculous extreme, fining bicyclists on a popular beachfront bike path $344 for not wearing a helmet on the offroad trail. That’s what we have to look forward to if helmet laws ever take hold here.

 

Competitive Cycling

Australian Ritchie Porte claims his home country’s WorldTour race, taking the ochre-colored jersey as winner of the Tour of Australia.

Lance Armstrong wants to take you on a bike tour of Mallorca with fellow doper George Hincapie for the low, low price of just $30,000. Or you could go with another world champ and cancer survivor for a bag of dirt.

 

Finally…

When your own backyard is a BMX park. If you’re carrying meth on your bike, put a damn light on it — the bike, not the meth.

And if you’re going to use your bicycle as a getaway vehicle after burglarizing a bakery, don’t ride salmon.

And don’t fall off when the cops close in.

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RIP #8 #24.

And all the other victims of Sunday’s helicopter crash.

Morning Links: Inclusivity on the streets, the phantom threat of teenage ride-outs, and the war on bikes keeps going on

Today’s common theme is inclusivity on our streets.

Like the Harvard researcher who says cities should build “networks of wide, stenciled, red-painted, surface-lighted, barrier-protected, bicycle-exclusive cycle tracks” on main streets in “lower-income ethnic-minority neighborhoods” to help residents get to work quickly, safely and affordably, rather than focusing on wealthy, white residents.

Meanwhile, a Pittsburgh paper writes about the need to make the city’s streets “anything from an empowering outlet to a necessary refuge” for women, as well as those who “identify as women, queer, transgender, non-binary or anything outside of our typical notions of gender and sexuality.”

And no bias here. The NYPD kicked a group of 11 bike riders enjoying a Memorial Day picnic out of a park for not having a permit — even though the parks department doesn’t issue permits for holidays, and they’re only needed for groups of 20 or more. Never mind that it was the same group that was racially profiled…uh, targeted for not having bells on their bikes last month.

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Eben Weiss, aka Bike Snob, writes that the phantom threat of teenage-led bike outs doesn’t exist, except in the world of panicked, ratings motivated news reports.

It’s no surprise that rideouts rankle the tight-of-sphincter; Homo sapiens probably started feeling contempt for anybody younger than them as soon as our life expectancy hit 30. And yes, being teenagers, rideout participants also do things a mature adult might consider “stupid.” In fact, I’m willing to bet some of them are even listening to that rap music and smoking the pot.

Even so, there’s not a shred of evidence that what has become an international phenomenon has resulted in an alarming rate of injury to either the public or to the riders themselves, and the likelihood that one of them might knock you down unintentionally—let alone target you for an attack—is so tiny as to be laughable.

Although he might want to decide whether to call them bike-outs, ride-outs or rideouts.

I stumbled on the first of what I assume will be many LA ride-outs on Memorial Day, as well walked past a group of young bike riders gathered in a park near The Grove.

Around 45 minutes later, they came rolling through the upscale mall, whooping  and popping wheelies, 30 or so teenage boys, mostly on fixies, as shoppers jumped out of their way.

As much as I admired their spirit, and the sheer rebellion in their affront to an icon of LA commercialism, putting that many pedestrians at risk was questionable, at the very least.

Although in my imagination, I like to assume it was done out of righteous indignation after one of the riders was kicked out of the Grove with his bike.

But next time, maybe keep the ride-outs to the street outside, where the only people they’ll annoy are safely wrapped in a few tons of steel and glass.

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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps going on.

And on.

A Welsh man was lucky to escape serious injury when he crashed into a wire someone had strung across a bike path at chest level, knocking him off his bike and cracking his helmet.

An Australian grandfather describes how he survived by playing dead after a man standing behind a car shot him twice in the head while he was riding his bike on a dirt trail two years ago, for no apparent reason; his would-be killer still hasn’t been found.

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Local

LAist checks in with LA’s great e-scooter experiment after the first official six weeks, noting that the Los Angeles Fire Department has responded to just 74 scooter-related incidents so far this year, although sadly, there’s been one death.

Yes, your bicycle is currency on LA’s Skid Row.

Pasadena police celebrated Bike Month with a bicycle and pedestrian enforcement detail last Fridays, ticketing 85 drivers for violations that endanger people on foot or two wheels; just five people on bikes were busted, along with 17 pedestrians. Which refutes all those people who insist that people on bikes always break the law.

The Venice Electric Light Parade is still going strong after three years, with hundreds of lighted bikes rolling on the bike path every Sunday at sunset to promote bike safety.

Santa Monica police impounded 32 Wheels e-scooters being used on the beachfront bike path; the scooters are allowed in neighboring Venice, but not in Santa Monica. And warned users of over 150 other e-scooters that they’re not allowed on the bike path.

A Santa Monica letter writer says the leading pedestrian intervals and bike traffic lights at Colorado and Ocean Avenues are going to get someone killed. Never mind that they were installed to improve safety for bike riders and pedestrians.

 

State

California’s League of Cities expresses concern over a proposed law to establish state standards for e-scooters, saying it could mark the end of affordable bikeshare and scooter programs.

The Orange County Transportation Authority, aka OCTA, marked Bike Month with a three-mile bike rally in Orange on Thursday, making up for a rainout the previous week.

A nine-year old San Diego boy will have to walk to school now, after a thief was caught on video stealing his BMX bike.

A Berkeley bike rider says the city’s bike boulevards are nothing more than fiction, while complaining that drivers hit us, yell at us, even kill some of us. And then want to talk about their feelings.

San Francisco Uber drivers are told it’s up to them whether to endanger bike riders by illegally picking up and dropping off passengers in bike lanes.

 

National

It’s the 35th anniversary of the Remember the Removal bike ride, which follows the route of the shameful Trail of Tears.

Bicycling offers up an entirely subjective list of the greatest bikes ever made — if you can get past the nausea-inducing rapid fire photo montage at the top of the page. And if you can get past the fact that it doesn’t include a single bike from the last century, which I can’t.

Bike Portland asks where your kids should ride in relation to you for the greatest comfort and safety.

This is who we share the roads with. A Spokane WA man was driving with a suspended license, and didn’t have the interlock system installed on his car required for a previous DUI, when he fled the scene after running a stop sign and seriously injured a bike-riding boy.

Talk about getting it wrong. A deputy director with Utah’s Department of Transportation, who has apparently never heard of induced demand, says they need wider roads to avoid gridlock like California — which enjoys wide roads along with hellish traffic congestion.

A California artist is riding her bike across Nebraska as part of a “performative work” to follow defunct railroad tracks across the US and explore the gaps in existing rail trails.

Inc. examines how Wisconsin-based Trek grew to $1 billion in sales with a renewed focus on quality and service.

Speaking of Bicycling, they say New York’s Citi Bike bikeshare has gotten more butts on saddles than any other bike. Including a ride-by shooter.

A successful pilot project means bike riders could be allowed to use leading pedestrian intervals at nearly 3,500 additional New York City intersections.

 

International

A Calgary columnist says the Idaho Stop Law doesn’t have to be a hot potato, and the more he thinks about it, the more it makes sense.

The Irish hitman who allegedly killed a reputed mob leader in a bike-by shooting died on his front lawn in a hail of gunfire. Although his killers arrived in a car.

Bike riding continues to surge in Copenhagen, climbing to a 49% mode share, as the city considers further restrictions on car use.

No surprise here. That video we linked to yesterday showing an Australian driver brake check a group of bicyclists has sparked outrage among bike riders, while online commentators continue to blame the people on two wheels.

 

Competitive Cycling

Former race leader Primoz Roglic cracks on a rainy stage of the Giro, raising questions of whether the Slovenian cyclist can make the podium, let alone win.

An artistically inclined former Grand Tour stage winner thinks the modern domestique is undervalued.

 

Finally…

Maybe you can’t walk on water, but you can ride an ebike on it. Of course you want to see video of Phil Gaimon’s Cookie Corner on the Mt. Baldy stage of the AToC.

And even a tornado knows better than to mess with the Wright Brothers bike shop.